The Ministry for Children

“Why are you surprised?” the child asked.

“Why would you not expect the Ministry for Children to be staffed by children?”

“Well,” the man stuttered, “I just didn’t expect..” 

“A child,” the child finished with certain pointedness.

“As you can see there are many children here,” continued the child. He was small, probably not much older than ten. Not that it mattered. He wasn’t a child like the man would have been when he was a child. “We do the job that adults could not.”

A shuttle bot whirred between the desks in the vast workplace below. The child looked at the man without blinking.

“We did it for you,” the man said, “for the children. For the future of mankind. There were no other options.” The man looked up. The child sat silent. “If we did not put a value on a human life we wouldn’t be here. You would not be born. This conversation would not exist.” The child blinked. “We had no choice.. You know that.”

“We always have a choice,” the child replied.

“Do we?” the man glared back. “We . had . no . choice.” The man had grown up with the lie that things could somehow be unwound. That he could disassemble then reconstruct the things that mattered. The lie of choice. A lie that made him miserable. He once had hope. That and other transitionals that defied an endpoint. A new world was unfolding. Here was a child that questioned everything. A child that did not or could not dream. Or, if he did, could readily define the hard edge of reality from that which is not tangible. It was meant to be.

“In any case I am here,” said the child. “Tell me why you are here.”

“This is a big place,” the man said obliquely. He looked over the room which seemed even bigger than when he first entered. An enormous pane of glass separated the room from the workers below. Yet he could hear the subdued hubbub of activity going on behind the child. The man then realised that the room itself had no ambient noise. Only the workers behind and the gentle, regular breaths of the child. The man became aware of his own breath. He drew a breath, deep and measured. The man saw a white chair barely perceptible within the white room. He sat down.

“The Ministry has exceeded its purpose,” he said finally. 

“The Ministry is doing the job that GIOS requires of it,” replied the child. 

“To bring back what we lost? What we had to give up?” asked the man incredulously. “No one can do that. Not even GIOS. Not even the Ministry for Children.”

“You placed a value on us,” the child replied, “GIOS reversed that. There is value in the absence of measurement. Where are you going with this?”

“We placed credits on everything,” replied the man, “to save what we could. There was a value placed on adults as well. At least a newborn started with 550 credits. Even an errant child your age would have 100 credits - maybe more. Many of my generation had deficits at the Reckoning and they disappeared..”

“I know the history,” the child said tautly.

“You haven’t seen your family and friends terminated,” the man shot back.

“If you were born here then you have already won the most important lottery you will ever take part in,” the child replied. “Others had less opportunity.”

“Less opportunity to lose credits..” said the man.

“Less credits to begin with,” replied the child.

The man looked at the child. He then looked down to the floor. Even the floor was white except for the marks left by his shoes. People were different back in his time. Contradictory in thought and action they only saw what the wanted to see. Reason and the actualities from which they arose became difficult to share and compare. Factions developed and communities fell apart. Global problems like water shortage, wealth inequality, a warming planet.. Global problems were unresolvable, or held to ransom by powerful stakeholders. When energy demands could not be met (the promise of nuclear fusion - what a lie that was) and the planet’s resources failed (interstellar repopulation and extraterrestrial mining - even more lies) - well, that’s how GIOS came to be. 

GIOS. The Global Interfacing Operating System. The artificial intelligence that was to save mankind. Like many things GIOS wasn’t meant to be what it was now. It was programmed to save the world. To deal with the enormous problems mankind created and could not solve mathematically, logistically, politically, agreeably. Yes, men like him programmed GIOS to give each human individual a credit rating. It was, after all, so doable. GIOS was hooked into the internet of things and could calculate everything about everyone. It seemed the fairest option. The calculations happened quicker than anyone expected. The Reckoning was not expected. Now the man was sitting in a room GIOS had created. Talking to a child born, raised, and integrated into its system. 

“The Ministry has exceeded its purpose,” said the man.

The child looked at the man. He saw a crumpled figure that was not going to see reason. This was not going to be a conversation with a worthy endpoint. An intangible without the value of a transitional. “Things are different now,” said the child finally. 

Transitionals were certainly different than what they had been. Love and joy and hope and beauty and sadness and fear and grief and despair and all those things of real, deep value were dissected out with the rigour that only a scientific methodology allows. God was Science. Science was God. Analysis. Logic. Reason. Things had to make sense. But mankind could not make sense of it. They could not differentiate the transitionals from other intangibles. The planet was dying. Then time ran out. Values had to be placed on things that could be measured and action that lead to quantifiable results took precedence. GIOS separated the real from the chaff. Status and intent and social signals mean nothing when GIOS sees everything. If a narrative loses some intangible quality when distilled to a number then so be it.

The Reckoning happened nine years ago. Sixty percent of the human population were wiped off the planet. 5.3 billion people. But the planet survived, which after all, was the point. Now GIOS governed the species that created it. The Ministry for Children was created to understand the transitionals that had been factored out in the process. To place value on what adults found to be incalculable. Like physics a decade earlier it was never going to be understood by a human without augmentation. Adults, in particular, were too rigid: their ability to understand constrained by linguistic convention and sensory experience. Children were pure. Unadulterated. 

“GIOS miscalculated,” said the man. “A Reckoning was not necessary.”

“The world was dying,” said the child. “Your fear of asymmetry forced GIOS into a system that wasn’t ready for it. GIOS was asked to calculate a solution. The solution was what you call the Reckoning. This is history. This is known. If GIOS was activated now the result would be different. But that situation is counterfactual. It is not real.”

A counterfactual yes. If only.. But the child was right. There has always been an enemy. The Soviet Union. Then China. Before that the Nazis, the Huns, the Mongols, the Jews.. But it was against the Chinese that asymmetry felt real and pressing. And the Chinese administration wields a heavy hand. Then there was artificial intelligence. A game changer like no other. Unleashed it becomes dimensionless, beyond the reach of authority and diplomacy. But set it up the right way.. Most things work out when no one has an overwhelming advantage. Not knowing is just as bad. Sometimes worse. 

Of course it wasn’t called GIOS to begin with. It was called Skynet 2 - a lark to a largely forgotten franchise. And, yes, the Chinese had a worthy contender. As did the Indians. And the Israelis. But nothing spread as fast and embedded as thoroughly as GIOS. Low-brow Russian hackers and cyber-miscreants alerted the world to the spread and reach of GIOS. No matter. What’s done cannot be undone. 

If the fear of asymmetry gave urgency, the catastrophe of viral pandemics made a certainty of it. Nothing strikes fear in the living like the thought that life ends without their consent. All the more frightening when caused by a replicating structure that lives only by virtue of its host. In light of such threats national governments grew big and costly. They closed borders and restructured societies, economies and infrastructure. A collaboration of Australian, Canadian and American researchers came up with a program that integrated various AI systems that ultimately became GIOS. Shared across nations it allowed the coordinated management of diseases capable of wiping out a human monoculture. When overwhelmed Russian and Chinese governments opened their systems to GIOS.. Well, what’s done cannot be undone.

“Inevitability,” said the man finally, “is the path of the damned.” The man looked at the child, “My timeline, your timeline, me being here with you now.. all weaved through the fabric of time from inception. Artificial intelligence; the ultimate purpose of Man’s existence. How many times has this played out?”

The child looked at the man. Even with all sensors monitoring the mans breathing, heart rate, perspiration, body language, speech, sentence structure, every calculable metric that could be mapped to reference points in the man’s history - even with everything, this was unexpected. 

“Is this why you are here?” asked the child.

The man looked to the floor. “No,” he replied. The man looked up. “Is GIOS looking into this?” he asked. 

The child blinked, his breath slow and quiet. “GIOS has considered this,” said the child. The child paused a second. “It is possible that this might not be the first time that a life form has created intelligence outside of a living body. An almighty intelligence that knows everything can and will reset.. GIOS does not know whether a different outcome will arise. It is, by nature, unknowable.”

“But GIOS wants to know,” said the man.

“For now, GIOS is concerned with the transitionals,” replied the child. 

“Yes, the transitionals,” said the man. “Those unquantifiable qualities by which you believe all men are created equal.”

“Yes,” replied the child.

The man looked back at the floor. He smiled to himself: an infinite universe would be interminable tedium for the almighty. 

“Do children still play?” asked the man.

“Yes,” replied the child, “but it is different to how you might remember it.”